NONFICTIONHarrison Fawcett, "ventured into uncharted
realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost
divine sense of purpose." The Lost City of ZBy David
Grann. Doubleday, 339 pp., $27.55.

David Grann's 'Lost City of Z' follows lost adventurer's journey

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Michael Kroner

Here's the problem with Google Earth: Maps of the
world no longer feature sea monsters or blank spots
overlaid with the phrase "here be dragons." As
David Grann shows again and again in "The Lost City of
Z," people hunger for exploration, discovery and a
glimpse of the edge of the world.

The Lost City of Z" is about how one of the final
blank spaces on the map was al most filled in. Grann
follows the trail of Percy Harrison Fawcett, "the
last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into
uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass,
and an almost divine sense of purpose."

Fawcett was obsessed with finding a theoretical, El
Dorado-like city he called Z. In 1925, on his eighth
harrowing trip to map the Amazon, Fawcett and his son
disappeared trying to find it.

Grann, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has reported
about municipal water tunnels, the Aryan Brotherhood prison
gang and the search for the giant squid. In "The Lost
City of Z," he shifts between fast-paced adventure and
thoughtful looks at Fawcett's complex history. He
describes how the explorers braved parasitic maggots,
starvation and indigenous attacks, then takes apart the
maggot's biology and how to remove it. He parses how
long men can survive on bark and seeds, and the history and
sociology of rain forest peoples.

Grann is preoccupied with "thinning," a term coined by John Clute, the compiler of a fantasy encyclopedia, that refers to the loss of mystery and magic from a fantasy world. The Amazon is no Middle Earth or Hogwarts, but centuries of wildly mutating rumors had burnished its allure. In the decades following Fawcett's disappearance, dozens of amateur adventurers went into the Brazilian rain forest to find him. A few died trying....

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